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Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Here’s something that annoys me a bit when I reference a blocklist. I say this with the understanding that large instances’ block-reasons visible to non-members should serve as reference for non-members (other mods, prospective users, etc.):

Intentionally vague terms such as “bad vibes” make for a great reason to block on a user level, or even a small tight-knit instance. Without further elaboration, they make for terrible reasons to attach to moderation decisions for large more-open instances. Such vagueness seems like a rhetorical tool to launder a lack of block reason. Seeing “Vibes” used this often on something that’s supposed to give transparency has weird vibes tells me something about how we’ve normalized rhetorically deceptive language in moderation transparency. Just be honest and leave the reason blank instead of exposing the fact that you can’t actually name what’s wrong with an instance.

A lack of explanation is fine. It’s honest: it means “we aren’t making this reason public”. It still gives prospective users useful information about which instances they can expect to connect to. But providing the appearance of a reason is something else. If I don’t know why you blocked an instance with no block-reason, I can ask. Then I’ll know if I should act on it too. If the reason is “vibes” then it gives the impression that I’m supposed to just “know”, and that I shouldn’t ask for receipts since it should be self-evident. It might be self-evident (a brief scroll through e.g. Poast makes its block-worthiness obvious), so say that instead to make it clear.

“Vibes” isn’t the only intentionally-vague term I’m aware of, and I’m guilty of propagating some in the past.

Again, this doesn’t apply on small tight-knit instances whose users know what their mods meant. Do whatever your members want on those. “Vibes” is also fine if you elaborate with specific reasons.


Oops, this got wordy. I think the length exaggerates how strongly I feel about this. TLDR: moderation transparency shouldn’t select vague terms to hide a lack of reasons. It invites more questions while also discouraging people from asking them. Be honest about your unwillingness to give a public reason by not providing one.

18+ Seirdy,
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Actual TLDR: if your block reasons are meant for everyone then don’t hide behind intentionally-vague terms.

18+ Seirdy,
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

catch-all terms like “alt-fedi”, “vibes”, “yikes”, etc. belong in internal docs since y’all know what they mean in there. flaunting your hidden or missing knowledge in public is, like, the opposite of a flex. an honest lack of information is better than confusing ambiguity IMO.

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Hastur PR 949 mentioned meesee :gura_pleading:

I love being perceived by people working on things I’m interested in out of the blue. It gives me the fuzzy feelings.

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Certain search engines have reached out to me since I made my list of search engine indexes asking to be moved from the Bing-based engines section to the semi-independent engines section because they have their own indexes.

All returned zero organic link results for some time during the Bing outage.

Qwant has contacted others (not me) regarding claims of Bing-dependence whenever it became a hot topic, insisting that it mixes results from its own index with Bing (something usually against the Bing ToS unless you somehow manage to negotiate an exception, which rarely happens and has finer details covered by NDAs). Has anybody seen evidence of Qwant using its own index? It’s one of the engines whose organic results went completely dormant during the Bing outage.

Uraael,

@Seirdy

Qwant's service was absolutely non-functional yesterday. Are we expected to believe it's coincidence that "their own index" collapsed at the same time and for the same length of time as Bing's API did? "We've built an index but it doesn't work without someone else's bigger index" isn't building an index.

I can't see that they have a leg to stand on, and I'm moving them into the negative column for even daring to try and suggest otherwise.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@Seirdy Thanks for doing this. I think it is a shame now many 'alternative' search engines are just using Bing results, or 99% Bing, and put much effort into dissembling when asked about it.

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

“Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.”

Neuromancer on Harambe

skyfaller,
@skyfaller@jawns.club avatar

@Seirdy My favorite temporary Internet subculture was Snakes on a Plane, which (as I remember it) disappeared the moment the movie came out, because the movie was neither good enough nor bad enough to justify building your personality around it. It could never live up to the sheer audacity of the title.

It was a perfectly OK movie. I liked the music video for the theme song by Cobra Starship.

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Please stop using service workers for your text-and-image websites without testing in secure browsing profiles, with privacy/security features designed to fuck up how service workers behave.

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar
  • What a week, huh?
  • Captain, ISO-8601 weeks start on Monday
Seirdy,
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

I got some questions in private. Since answers may be appreciated by others too, I’ll summarize what I said/found.

Basically, ISO-8601 defines a format for every possible date/time-related information: week dates, day-month-year timestamps, durations, offsets, time zones, etc. It’s the bible of how to specify something date/time-related, if you’re willing to purchase the standard (WHY is it paywalled??). Other subsequent standards with narrower focus generally subset this standard and relax some of its more strict requirements.

RFC-3339 is about how computers should display dates. A much narrower focus makes it a subset, though it does make some parts of the ISO-8601 notation optional (most notably the separator between the date and time: you can say 2024-05-19 05:46:52+00:00 instead of 2024-05-19T05:46:52+00:00, or use a different separator like a lowercase “t”) to also become a slight superset. Both RFC-3339 and the HTML Living Standard avoid any significant contradictions with ISO-8601.

Weeks starting on Monday appear to be a thing in all three standards. We are still in 2024-W20 right now according to HTML and the ISO, and tomorrow (Monday) will be the beginning of 2024-W21.

There’s a good visualizer of the overlap between the three standards by Iain MacDonald here. It’s followed by a more accessible table.

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Reminder that labelling yourself as a bot in your profile is fine but you will get automatically filtered out of many other users’ timelines.

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

If someone instantly reacts to the existence of data collection and inference by saying “isn’t this against GDPR?” they probably don’t know what the GDPR is or does, but they’re also probably right.

puppygirlhornypost,
@puppygirlhornypost@transfem.social avatar

@Seirdy yeah i find it cute how that happens. most of the time this comes up it's not the case of "oh we are providing informed consent regarding our handling of your data, we accept deletion requests, abide by the standards set in place to secure PII and we have an export you can get of your data".

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Quoting this on Global Accessibility Performative Awareness Day as a reminder that LLM-based tools like MDN AI Help naturally amplify their datasets’ biases, including biases against disabled people.

RE: https://pleroma.envs.net/objects/ead2ed19-7ebf-4211-9beb-23a8c0acb79f

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

If you argue that your GUI toolkit is better than others because it’s “suckless” I’ll assume it completely lacks any kind of support for bidirectional text, advanced font rendering necessary for several non-Latin languages, or accessibility.

matt,

@Seirdy Ditto for "Handmade".

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Firefox shoud now support extensions’ content scripts on pages with a sandbox CSP/iframe directive:

Bugzilla bug 1411641: CSP ‘sandbox’ directive prevents content scripts from matching, due to unique origin, breaking also browser features is resolved in the v128 branch, coming in a few months.

Meanwhile WebKit doesn’t even support media controls on pages with a sandbox directive, requiring me to relax it on any page with a video or audio element.

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

An incomplete list of expensive fads in Silicon Valley:

  • Tablets will replace PCs en masse instead of complement them (the “Post-PC era”).
  • Blockchain (cryptographically-verified, decentralized pyramid schemes) will replace databases.
  • Prompt engineering would replace creative labor.

What came before the Post-PC era?

Seirdy, to react
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

New bookmark: React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity.

“React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains”. An amazing write-up by @baldur about the de-skilling of developers to reduce their ability to fight back against their employers.


Originally posted on seirdy.one: See Original (POSSE).

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Apple apologizes for iPad ad

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” said Tor Myhren, the company’s VP of marketing communications. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”

Interestingly, Google used the same language to conclude its apology for its generative AI’s historical depictions of race. It explained its intention with flowery language and then said “But it’s missing the mark here”.

I wonder if we’ll be seeing more of this type of response to corporate tone-deafness (a generous term) going forward. Big “I’m sorry you feel that way (but this isn’t indicative of any problems with me)” vibes.

Seirdy,
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

TLDR: Apple showed its ass, and they’re sorry you feel that way.

Seirdy,
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

bangs head on wall

The problem isn’t that people didn’t like something you did. the problem you need to address is why they didn’t like it.

Corporate apologies like this prove that they observed people unhappy about something. It reads like an apology to investors for making people unhappy, not an apology to the people who got angry. It would be ten times better to say nothing at all.

Why do PR departments keep doing this? Do they think statements like these work better than actual apologies?

Seirdy, to random
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

Onto the part of this cybersec crash-course that covers OSINT and it’s talking Shodan.

It’s funny because I’ve already been using Shodan regularly but for all the completely security-irrelevant reasons. Like finding domains with Gemini capsules or Gopher holes, or for searching for sites by favicon.

18+ Seirdy,
@Seirdy@pleroma.envs.net avatar

we need more favicon based search engines. searching with text is cheating.

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